Lenovo plans to build on India top spot

People heading to New Delhi, the capital city of India. The city is about 1,700 kilometers away by airplane from the country's IT city Bangalore. The country's gross domestic product reached $1,843.38 billion last year. [Photo/China Daily]

Even though the company experienced significant growth during the last few years, it still can't rid itself of the image of an industrial brand, which was inherited from IBM. Six years ago, the company took over IBM's personal computer business and also IBM's manufacturing in India.

The company's next target is to boost its consumer sector sales, said Babu. Yang said the company's industrial PCs are produced according to orders but the number of consumer devices is decided after research.

The PC market in India is huge, Babu said. The PC penetration rate in India is still less than 10 percent. It averages about 16 percent in emerging countries and 87 percent in mature markets, according to Milko van Duijl, senior vice-president of Lenovo Group.

Two months ago, the company introduced its tablet PC into the Indian market. Tablet shipments in India are expected to grow sharply from 3 million in 2011 to 23.6 million in 2017.

However, Babu also mentioned that there are differences between the Chinese and Indian IT markets. According to the US-based IT research company IDC, China's IT spending was about four times more than India's in 2011. In the PC market, the gap was even wider, at 6.9 times in 2011.

Overall IT spending in India is roughly about $30.2billion and is expected to grow at 21.3 percent annually to reach $65.3 billion by 2015, said the research company.